Monday, 22 July 2013

Writers’ houses make good holiday
destinations. The Brontë Parsonage,
Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, Jane Austen’s home at Chawton, Henry James at Lamb
House, Rye: been there, done that. Best of all are those places where I think I
get a sense of how the writer liked to work. Small rooms usually: Dylan
Thomas’s writing shed at
Laugharne, for instance, or the little bedroom added on to Monk’s House in Sussex for
Virginia Woolf.

Now,
though, I have visited the most extraordinary writer’s house I have ever seen.
In Guernsey last week I was lucky enough to be one of a small party given a
private tour of Victor Hugo’s home, Hauteville House. Our
guide was Odile Blanchette, custodian and curator, keeper
of the Hugo flame, fund-raiser for urgently-needed conservation work to the
property and (in case all this was not enough) French Consul in St. Peter Port.

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) went
into exile in 1852. Already the leading French Romantic writer of his time, he had
protested against the coup d’état
staged by Louis-Napoleon, and after taking to the barricades ‘in defence of
liberalism and democracy’*, had fled first to Belgium and then, for three
years, to Jersey. “But he didn’t stay long on Jersey,” explained Trev, the Yorkshire-born
Tantivy coach driver
who took us around that island in May. “ ’E wor a bit gobby, so we kicked ’im
out.” Well, that was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory, but just about
accurate enough to explain how Hugo came to find himself on Guernsey. He loved
the island; for him it became ‘ce rocher d'hospitalité et de liberté’. And here in 1856 he bought 38,
Hauteville Street, a substantial house with a good garden and a distant view of
the St. Peter Port harbour and Castle Cornet.

The
house today stands almost exactly as he left it. It’s in part a shrine to
himself: the initials VH crop up everywhere
– even in the trellis work on the white wall of the conservatory. In part,
though, it’s also a shrine to his extraordinary imagination, an imagination
constantly reworking history. Apart from the family room on the ground floor,
with traditional family portraits, carom billiards table
and divans around the walls, every other room is eccentrically or exotically
furnished - or both. The furniture, the wall hangings, the assemblages of Delft
tiles everywhere you look, compose a kind of grand bricolage: old chests, ancient linen-fold panelling, church
woodwork, and then more domestic objects, flat-iron trivets, chair backs – all
of this dismantled, recycled and reassembled into a wonderfully bizarre yet imposing
décor.

But
that’s only the ground floor. The reception rooms upstairs – the Red Room and
the Blue Room – are sumptuously furnished with silks, damask hangings, chinoiserie and genuine Chinese artwork. ‘Rococo’ hardly does them justice. And then,
to the floor above: Hugo’s library is housed in glass-fronted bookcases on the
landing – located there rather than in his study, we were told, so that his
servants could also read and enjoy the books. They certainly look to have been
well thumbed.

And
thence into the strangest room of all, sometimes known as the Garibaldi
Room. It’s a magnificent bedchamber, but one to die in, not to die for.
Really, it’s two rooms in one: a bedroom with a formidable bed that looks out
apparently onto a thicket of carved wooden columns and candelabra. The other
half of this chamber unnervingly resembles a courtroom. Behind a large table three high-backed chairs
confront the bed and any unfortunate occupant, alive or dead. Hugo, so Odile tells
us, may have designed this room for his own death, but evidently only passed
one night in it. I’m not surprised.

What did
surprise me was what came next. From the library landing, a small and almost
hidden staircase leads up to Hugo’s ‘lookout’. This is a once-tiny attic room
(no doubt originally servants’ quarters) he had extended by creating a conservatory
built into the roof, a loft conversion avant
la lettre, with wonderful views out to sea. Here, in this sparsely
furnished eyrie, Hugo wrote. He did not sit at a desk, but had a writing
surface fixed up against the sea-facing windows, and at this he stood to write,
finishing his longest, finest book of all,Les Misérables. The story of the reformed
convict, Jean Valjean, and of his nemesis, Javert, was completed at this table,
from which its author could look out on a clear day and just discern the French
coast. Here’s his own description of the view:

Et cependant, pensif, j’écris à ma fenêtre,

Je regarde le flot naître, expirer, renaître,

Et les goëlands fendre l’air.

Les navires au vent ouvrent
leurs envergures,

Et ressemblent au loin à de grandes figures

Qui se promènent sur la mer.

And
still, deep in thought, I write at my window,

I watch
the tide come in, go out, come in again.

And the
gulls slice though the air.

Ships
unfurl their sails before the wind:

Seen
far off they remind me of giants

Who stroll
up and down on the sea.

But even now, just when we think we have seen
everything, we have not done: there is yet more. Out through French windows, the
pantiles and decorated chimneys of St Peter Port suddenly at eye level, we
climb a last few steps to the topmost balcony, the highest point of Hauteville,
and stand literally on the rooftop. It’s almost dusk, and the harbour lights
are shining. We can’t quite believe we are where we are. It is surely something
to have shared this spectacular view with one of the most famous writers Europe
ever produced, a viewpoint he himself fashioned, the final, simplest room of the
house: Victor Hugo’s belvedere.

As sunset gives way to twilight, we
descend. I remember that over the doorway of the ground-floor dining room, one
of the first rooms Odile showed us, Hugo had carved the words EXILIUM
VITA EST. When I’d first read this I assumed he had meant, ‘Life is exile’.
But now, after standing where Hugo stood, first by his writing surface in the
look-out and then with my hand on the same rooftop railing he used to hold, I
think his motto meant something much more positive: ‘Exile is life’.

Thursday, 4 July 2013

Were medieval men and women, especially
those who did not have to trouble themselves with reading and writing, particularly long sighted? They would have found it useful when looking at
stained glass. We are used to being told these days that the great windows of European
cathedrals, depicting scriptural and historical narratives, were the ‘bible of
the poor’. This analogy only works, though, if the poor could actually see and make sense of
the images in windows that might be fifty feet or more above their heads.

But even assuming they could make out
images we struggle to see without a telephoto lens, how might they have ‘read’ and
enjoyed what they saw?

I pondered this last week in Rouen
Cathedral. The windows in the déambulatoire behind the High

Altar rise from well above head-height almost to
the vault, and because the passage is relatively narrow, it’s hard to stand far
enough back to take in the detail of the any but the lower glass. Of course,
the initial impact is exhilaratingly abstract, and I’ve no doubt that stained
glass artists in the past century (think of Coventry Cathedral, or the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche in Berlin) have modelled their designs on such abstraction. Nevertheless,
the individual scenes are written with the immediacy of a graphic novel, and
actually with a good deal more animation.

Look, for instance, at the Rouen stained glass 'medallion' I’ve
chosen, an early scene from a sequence of pictures telling the story of the
Passion. Here is Jesus, kneeling, with a golden (but presumably brass) bowl beside
him. He’s washing the feet of his disciples, and has reached Peter, whom we can
identify by the keys he holds in his hand – the keys of the Kingdom, with which
Jesus will later entrust him. Another disciple, unidentified this time, sits
beside Peter.

The image is radically simplified: although
this event occurs at the start of the Last Supper, there is no attempt to
suggest the Upper Room or the table set for thirteen people. The focus is
entirely on the action taking place. The
footwashing image itself, the feet and the hands painted onto a single piece of
glass, is framed within a border of lead, just below the centre of the not-quite-circular
medallion. Peter’s ankle rests in the left hand of Jesus; the other hand washes his
toes. Peter himself seems tired: his cheek rests on his palm, and he appears to
have his eyes closed, as if in anticipation of his falling asleep later that
evening in the Garden of Gethsemene (‘Could ye not watch with me one hour?’
Jesus will ask him reproachfully). The other disciple glances sideways to check
how he is reacting. Jesus has his eyes wide open, but he looks not at the
others but into some future only he can see. It is as if the story takes place
simultaneously in time and out of it, and this idea is emphasized by the way
the medallion functions almost like a celestial body floating in space: it is,
after all, surrounded by stars.

The composition, too, demands our
attention. There is an imbalance in the picture: Jesus, a larger figure, occupies
one half of the circle with only the blue background (heavenly blue?) behind
him; the disciples crowd into the other, their haloes and robes breaking into
the border that encircles the medallion . This red border, too, is important: it
is echoed in miniature by the halo around Jesus’ head. Those flecks of pale
blue glass in the halo (placed as it were at nine o’clock and twelve) are not
just to break up the pattern: symbolically they indicate the four points of the
cross, the other two of course obscured behind the head. I count at least fifty
individual pieces of glass making up that red and white border; no two pieces
are exactly the same, certainly not in shape, rarely in colour. In the medallion as a whole, there are over two hundred. Each has had to be chosen, cut to an
already pre-drawn pattern, painted if there is outline detail or decoration on
it, fired (sometimes more than once) then assembled, fitted together into the lead
‘cames’ – H-sectioned strips of lead into which each piece of glass is
sealed using gum or beeswax – and secured within a larger panel which will be
held in place by being attached to the two iron saddlebars you can see crossing
the image horizontally. Hard to imagine the difficulty (and danger) of
installing such a fragile thing within a larger sequence of images and
patterns; ensuring that the whole window is fixed securely enough to withstand
the stresses of the building and the extremes of the weather. There are few, if
any, other forms of visual art that involve so many different skills and so
much artistry and craftsmanship – cinema, perhaps, the only other art dependent
upon light passing through a transparent medium.

The guidebook tells me that the golden
stars surrounding the medallion were restored in 1462 by Guillaume Barbe,
the master glazier responsible for much of the spectacular 15th
century glass on the north side of the cathedral. We need guidebooks for
information such as this, though in this age of apps and podcasts guidebooks
are starting to look a little, well, quaint. Ironically, though, as we return to the era of the spoken word, and as we walk around listening to a
voice in our ear, our experience is not so different from that of our medieval
forebears. No doubt the voices in their ears belonged to the monks who, for a
small fee, would tell them approximately what was what in which window.

Of course, not even the monks could have
seen – as we can - the whites of the disciples’ eyes. Here technology truly
helps. Now we can virtually see with our own eyes why stained glass really is one of the
crowning achievements of medieval art.

Adrian Barlow

Click here for an invaluable
glossary of stained glass terms and techniques.

In the second of this mini-series, Reading Stained Glass (ii), I shall
focus on a window in a church in the Isle of Oxney in Kent, a window that can
be read close-up, and at ground level. Meanwhile, I have previously written
about stained glass in

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk